thanks once again sir max and apologize, i need to go to bed now after your presentation today's day 1 class of basic industrial control processing...excellent job and i want to know more about the presentation till day 5 class lesson...i will be back tomorrow's night after office hour to finish the class...

thanks also to digikey and design news for giving me a chance in the continuing education to fullfill my PDH Certificate units and learning additional knowledge with respect to latest trend of technology and that's GREAT!

EXCELLENT AND GREAT PRESENTATION SIR MAX...goodnight to all and see you all tomorrow, bye...

Great lecture about history of industrial mechanisms and circuits. The topic does not directly related to my curent work, but it has very good concept of general understanding in automated control flows.

Very good seminar, I can relate directly. My formal back ground has be electronics but over the years I have found that I needed to understand other disiplines such as mechanical and flow mechanics in the performance of my daily tasks. Like the previous post while starting in my first postion in 1969 where I worked for a small electronics company building telephone switching equipment and having to build specialized equipment to automate manufacturing processes. I have been lucky to have worked in manufacturing then test engineering, product engineers, design engineering and R&D. My initall experince in manufactuing processes definately helped make me a better engineer and develop better products.

I have worked in automated manufacturing since 1968 -- where indeed we did use mini computers and the original versions of "micro processors" to automate manufacturing processes. Of course initially I was in computer manufacturing where we did indeed "eat our own dog food".

For many of us the process was integrated from design through manufacturing and automation was present at most steps -- if not all.

Good introduction and enjoyable presentation. It took 2 or 3 slides to 'calibrate' to the King's English. Good history lessons too and important in establishing a solid foundation, so many have come before us, we stand on the shoulders of giants. My favorite Clive is Clive Staples Lewis so 'Max' it is. Jolly good show!

The explanation give for an Embedded SBC has great similarity in concept to Embedded software. This SW is often so transparen to the user of a device that he is unaware that there is any SW involved in the sensor, valve or whatever.

OK Everyone -- I'm afraid we have run over the hour .... I will look through all of these questions and maybe we will find time to answer some more of them tomorrow. I do hope that you will be coming back and that I'll "see" you then...

Someone asked "Max, can we use C or C+ for programming the PLCs?" I'm not sure about C (although I woudl expect so), but these days you can Program PLCs using older techniques like ladder logic or more modern forms including BASIC and C

Someone asked "Do Altera design FPGAs that are programable?" The idea is that all FPGAs are programmable. There are different underlying technologies. Some are based on antifuses and thes eare one-time programmable (OTP). Others are based on SRAM and they can be programmed and reprogrammed as many times as you wish...

Three Phase control is done by the mucroprocessors/embedded systems. The core driver for the motor will be something like a tyristor based amplifier or chopper circuit (a mix of analog components and digital swtching gear).

Max, can you show a sample or two of a "ladder logic" possibly in a future persentation? I think a picture may be worth a thousand words here. I'm wondering if this is something like some of the abrieviated schematics for relay controls I've seen in the past.

Re my definition of industrial control -- I think I said something like "In its most general sense – a control system is a device or set of devices that are used to manage, command, direct, or regulate the behavior of other devices, processes, or systems"

Re the question "Which type of Microcontroller is more reliable for electrical three phase speed control?" Eeek, that's a bit specific ... I think we would really need to talk to someone in the field about this...

Part of the "equation" is how many systems are you going to create? ASICs are cost effective if you are going to deploy millions of products using them ... FPGAs are cost effective if you are thinking of only tens of thousands of units...

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